Luis Rubio

What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?  Fentanyl in the United States is not only an electoral issue, but one of survival for its society. Although it is clear that the key to the enigma lies in the circumstances that lead to its consumption (of this and other drugs that came before), it is absurd to claim that Mexico is an irrelevant actor in this matter. In fact, the fentanyl crisis in our neighboring country is not different, in concept, from the security crisis that Mexico is experiencing and, more importantly, neither of the two nations can solve their own crisis without the concurrence of the other. It is the story of two crises that feed on each other.

In his novel about the era of terror before the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens scoffs at revolutionaries who aspire to make liberty and death compatible: “Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; – the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!” Fentanyl is no different for Americans than extortion, the narcos, and death that stalk countless Mexican cities and communities. The export of this drug, as occurred with its predecessors, feeds the power (and weapons) of the mafias that harass Mexicans.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that the president rejects both components of the equation: fentanyl is not produced in Mexico, nor is there a security crisis in the country. What the citizens of both nations suffer from is the product of their imagination. But both crises are real and have inexorable effects. Each society reacts to its circumstances differently due to the nature of their respective political systems, but that in no way changes the very fact that both societies are beset by factors that are irresolvable exclusively through internal action.

Drug use is not a product of their availability, but of the social factors that lead to the existence of demand. That is the challenge of American society. In the same way, the insecurity suffered by the Mexican population is not the result exclusively of the availability of weapons, but of the non-existence of police and judicial forces in Mexico to protect it. As the saying goes, it’s easy to see the speck in someone else’s eye and not the beam in your own.

Two of the most contentious issues in current American politics, especially considering the upcoming electoral contest (2024), are illegal migration and fentanyl. In both, Mexico is a leading actor. That is the irresistible force that is approaching and that is going to impact, whether Mexicans like it or not. In analytical terms, it is possible to discuss the wisdom of blaming third parties for the fact that there is demand, respectively, for drugs and labor, without which neither of these factors would be relevant. But that in no way changes the very fact that it is an onslaught that is already there and that no one can stop it. The big question is whether the Mexican government will continue to behave like an immovable object and, if so, what would be the consequences.

Insecurity in Mexico began markedly with the gradual weakening of the federal government’s security structures in the 1990s. It was the time when robberies and kidnappings suddenly increased. Until then, since the era of pacification that took place after the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917), the federal government had had such power and presence throughout the territory that this allowed for relative calm and harmonious coexistence. Due to its centralizing nature, the political system never favored the development of local capacities, in this case of security and justice. In this context, it is no coincidence that the gradual, and then accelerated, weakening of the federal government was accompanied by a collapse of security throughout the country. It was this vacuum that organized crime filled, undoubtedly assisted by the weapons that their profits from both criminal activities in Mexico and from drug exports allowed them. But the underlying problem is not weapons or drugs, but the lack of an effective government in Mexico.

It is useless to pontificate against the Americans when Mexico’s problems are so deep and indistinguishable, or at least not addressable, without the concurrence of the other. Therein lies the fallacy of the Mexican political discourse that, in turn, feeds the American rhetoric and makes it credible, as the recent criminal trials of Mexican characters in the US have illustrated. Instead of acting as an immovable object, Mexico could be looking for ways of mutual cooperation aimed at two inexorably linked objects: drugs in the US and violence in Mexico.

“Death may beget life, but oppression can beget nothing other than itself” Dickens concludes in the aforementioned novel. The story of two crises that can only be resolved to the extent that both nations cooperate together with their own action internally. Both live in denial, one blaming the other for their ills when their problems are internal, but they require the assistance of the other to attack them.

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Luis Rubio

The purpose is evident. The question is whether it dovetails with the needs of the citizenry, which, clearly, are not the needs of those who redacted the new bill of law. The “initiative in administrative matters of the federal executive branch” is the dream of any bureaucrat: the government decides what is done, how it is paid for, who benefits from it and, if they do not like what is about to come down the pike, they can suspend their acquisition or contract without indemnification. Never, during the decades during which I have observed the manner of proceeding of Mexican politicians have I seen anything as perverse and biased as this.

The bill in question has as its manifest purpose the removal of all latitude and freedom of action from the next government: to persevere in the paradise that today characterizes Mexico, ensuring the permanence of the economy in a recession, that the income does not increase and that the country continues responding to the obsessions of a sole individual.

The bill’s avowed objectives that, in rhetorical terms, appear to be sensible, in reality masquerade his megalomania: its nominal aim is to strengthen the rectorship of the State in the economy. The changes it proposes refer to the faculties and attributions of the government in matters of        concessions, permits, authorizations and licenses; modification (diminution) of potential indemnifications in the case of expropriation; elimination of compensation for damages or harm when a contract is revoked; and it includes a clause of early termination (exorbitant clause) to be added to all contracts with the government. Along the pathway, the preeminence is repealed that at present is granted to international treaties and arbitral agreements. In a word, full governmental faculties are conferred for conducting public affairs without any limitation.

This is about a sudden change in all rules of the game, like the news on electricity right in the middle of Holy Week, all geared toward altering the normative framework in radical fashion.  Were this legislation to be approved, all private investment would disappear, because legal protection would no longer exist. Unless the proposed law were declared unconstitutional eventually by the Supreme Court, the new legislation would usher in the end of the only source of investment that has flourished during the last four years:  the one that enters under the protection of the commercial agreements in force, including the most important, already approved by the current government, that is, the Mexico-United States-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

The express objective of this is not to terminate private investment, but instead to subject it to the preferences of the government-in-turn. Very much in the style of the Fourth Transformation (4T), the objective is for whosoever invests to be in debt to the government, which retains the legal faculty of wresting away authorization when it thus decides. That is exactly the opposite of what has been being built during the past decades, when the objective was to consolidate, and to render credibility to, the general rules that were applied neutrally and impartially. As we have seen in these years during which the government has been negotiating (or attempting to negotiate) special deals with each company, especially in the electrical ambit, the objective lies in extending this practice to the aggregate of the economy, bestowing upon it a halo of judicial legitimacy. The case of the Spanish clean-energy company   Iberdrola is illustrative: given that the company was not willing to negotiate in governmental terms, it ended up selling its assets. It appears obvious that the government acquired a political victory, while Mexico and Mexicans got impoverished along the way.

What the redactors of the initiative do not grasp, or do not recognize, is that entrepreneurs and investors, of any nationality, have at their feet the entire world regarding their opportunities to grow and develop. Certainly, the neighborhood with the United States offers an exceptional inducement that has served as protection in the face of the brunt of the battle that government has undertaken; however, that has worked (well below its potential) under the existing legal framework. Were the legal context to be modified as this bill proposes, the situation would be another, very distinct.

An old axiom says that “When a governmental entity cannot, or would rather not, adequately perform its primary function,  or when it feels like its function is insufficiently grand, the agency will expand its mission, thereby distracting attention from its core inadequacy. Sooner or later, everyone sits down at the banquet of consequences.” That is what this bill proposes to achieve: advance the mediocrity of the current reality in order to freeze it in time and render impossible the country’s development and prosperity.

Each person will judge the desirability of this initiative, but the consequences would be inexorable because, in addition to damaging the general credibility of the government and of the legal system, it would constitute a straitjacket for the upcoming administration, even if it came from AMLO’s party Morena.

As the great novelist Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “sooner or later everyone it seated at the banquet of the consequences.” We are now breaking into a run toward that.

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Luis Rubio

At the beginning of the year 2000 Mexico was facing a crossroads. The electoral contest was taking shape, the electoral institutions had been duly installed, and the expectation, overly justified, was that the electoral jousts  would be clean, competitive and pacific. However, no one knew what the result of the election would be. That is, Mexico was entering what later was known as “democratic normalcy” where there is certainty with respect to process but not to the result, precisely contrary to the history of the XX century, in which the result was known by all from the moment a candidate was nominated. Mexico has now returned to the world of the uncertainty of the process as well as of the result, which opens an infinity of possibilities, most of these auguring ill.

When that notable year was beginning for Mexican politics, 2000, I wrote the following: “Perhaps the greatest of the sources of risk resides in the recollection of the political violence registered the last time   we witnessed an electoral process to elect a federal executive [1994], a highly destructive moment.  It is in this context that it remains to be elucidated whether the coming months will take us nearer to the Shakespearian or theChekhovian model. In his tragedies Shakespeare’s personages ended up achieving the revindication of a sense of justice, but all were dead in the end; in Chekhov’s tragedies, everyone ended up sad, disillusioned, angry, disenchanted, embattled, bitter, but alive. The conflicts inherent in Mexican society are not going to disappear overnight; but what we Mexicans require is that the management of politics brings us closer to Chekhov, because the alternative is simply unacceptable.”

Twenty-three years later, and fourteen months from the next election, the country has advanced in certain aspects, but has retrogressed in many others and, thanks to the bills advanced by the government in electoral matters (the famous “Plan B”), the probability of greater deterioration both in political as well as in security matters can no longer be discounted. To start with, the great accomplishments in electoral matters -certainty in terms of the process, but not the result- could well be reverting for the sake of attempting to impose a result independent of the will of the electorate. A grand citizen triumph -perhaps the grandest in Mexican history- could be seeing its last days.

And that is so much more important in the light of the little that Mexican democracy has advanced in all the remaining areas. Although it advanced in electoral matters from 1997 on, the country could only with difficulty call itself democratic when no more than   58% of the electorate calls itself citizens (versus the 42% that assumes itself to be “the people”), a bare majority willing (and able) to defend their rights.  More to the point, no one could seriously argue that the country is basking in peace, that it enjoys an effective system of government, justice “swift and expeditious” and transparency and accountability on the part of responsible authorities, Clearly, things have changed, in many cases for the better, with respect to the era of the “hard” PRI, but Mexico does not qualify as democratic under  conventional international gauges.

Backward or forward? That is the predicament. Backward, the road marked by the new electoral setup advanced by the Executive branch would imply grave deterioration in democratic matters, but above all a growing risk of violence. Not even the shrewdest supporters of the regime could argue that the country has improved in economic, political, justice or security matters. The governmental narrative is verbose, but advances in the real world are nonexistent, and all of that accumulates over time to create an expanding and uncertain milieu that is more prone to hardly desirable scenarios.

Fourteen months to the next elections are many months of high politics and low passions.  Time for the candidates to take form, both the one of the government’s party as well as that of the opposition, time for the society to express itself in all its semblances and characteristics, a circumstance of a pluralistic society that does not accept the imposition of labels or fallacious skewing and disqualifiers. Time for the citizenry to shoulder their role and responsibility as corresponds to a free and sovereign society.

The National Electoral Institute (INE) -that weighty and complex entity- came into being thus due to the enormous uncertainty that existed, due to the potential for conflict that each   electoral contest generated and because, in the last instance, the citizenry had not been able or would not have wanted to take on the responsibility of limiting the abuse of the political parties or of the government. Almost three decades later, the citizenry must assume that role to guarantee that the process will be clean, competitive and pacific and that the result, whatever that may be, will be respected by all of the participants. That is the citizenry’s moment: with its majority vote it should guarantee the results being overwhelming and indisputable.

Shakespeare or Chekhov: therein lies the dilemma. As in any democracy that is respected, some will not be content with the result, but all should emerge alive, respected and duly recognized. With or without the INE, it would be best for the citizenry itself to guarantee it.

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Luis Rubio

What is the moment at which the social order breaks down?  When is it most probable for a society to enter processes of confrontation outside of the established institutional channels? Questions like these are the material of permanent discussion and analysis in academic as well as in governmental instances around the world. Some seek to explain the potential flareups, others attempt to prevent them.  What is interesting is that there is an increasingly greater coincidence in the criteria that these two so contrasting groups of professionals employ, and that coincidence intimates higher risks for Mexico.

The issue is not particularly new: the concern arose in the fifties, at a stage when coups d’ état, dictatorships, civil wars and other similar phenomena began in diverse nations worldwide. The moment when all this took place was not the product of chance: when WWII ended (1945), the United Nations as well as the winning powers devoted themselves to promote the development of nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Some of those countries had recently become independent, others had been defeated during the war and many more simply attempted to raise the growth rates of their economies. It soon resulted that these changes exerted destabilizing effects.

First the academic, and later the international and intelligence instances of the most powerful nations (of both sides of the barrier of the Cold War) dedicated themselves to try to understand and interpret the phenomenon. Thus was born the theory of modernization, whose initial objective was to comprehend the process of social and political change that ushered in industrialization.  Some argued that there were stages in the process of development, others observed the way the societies and their political systems evolved.

The focus changed when situations of conflict started to emerge, breaking social conflict and State coups d’état. Certain governments, especially those of United States and the Soviet Union, respectively, reacted in radical fashion, seeking to impose their law by means of force, frequently without success, or at least not without entailing long-term negative consequences. For their part, the scholars and analysts began to look for explanations for the phenomenon. The new era of interpretation, throughout the seventies, concluded that the problem was not one of underdevelopment nor of modernity (nor of development in itself) but instead one of a passageway between one and the other: on inducing economic processes of accelerated change the social order lost its natural equilibrium,  provoking conflict and, often, instability.

Fifty years later the matter has returned to the arena of discussion due to a new wave of situations of instability, but above all to a novel phenomenon. The characteristic of this period has been democratization in more and more nations. Some of these achieved a complete transition, accomplishing unusual stability (illustrated by cases such as Spain or South Korea). But, increasingly, the processes of democratization have undergone significant setbacks, which has led to the coining of terms such as “illiberal democracy,” “anocracy,” “ochlocracy” or, simply, autocracy. A Norwegian institution, the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), has committed itself to codifying events of that nature around the world to categoriz+e the conflicts.

The main conclusion of all these studies* is that the lack of consolidation of the democratic institutions is what leads to instability in this era. The nations more prone to conflict are those that remained in the stage of electoral democracy and/or that did not get as far as constituting themselves into true liberal democracies. The most delicate moment for those democracies is that at which the promises of democratization do not dovetail with the capacity of their governments and economies to satisfy them.  Which leads to the risk of instability or, more persistently in this era, to extremist leaders who arrive at power via the democratic route only to later consecrate themselves to dismantling the institutions that allowed them to ride the coattails to power.

Mexico is now at a crucial moment in these matters. The country was able to take a great leap forward during the nineties on creating exceptionally strong electoral institutions that facilitated equitable competition between the political parties and candidates, initiating a new political era. However, that enormous advance did not translate into improved well-being for the entirety of the population, in good measure because the governments that resulted from the democratic electoral processes did not always display the capacity to advance their projects or legislations   principally because the democratization was not accompanied by strong institutions that were effectively turned into effective counterweights.

That was the context in which there came into power in Mexico, via democratic means, a president who, from day zero, has applied himself to building a growing autocracy, without this representing a better conduit for the solution of the problems of the country. The risk of this evolution lies in the country’s mushrooming radicalization. The citizenry must respond to it in the face of so transcendental a challenge because the alternative is unacceptable and much more costly for all.

*A good summary is found in   Walter, Barbara F, How Civil Wars Start, Crown, 2022

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a quick-translation of this article can be found at www.luisrubio.mx

Luis Rubio

The neighborhood is not only complicated but also extraordinarily contrasting. Although the border region between Mexico and the United States constitutes an exceptional space, distant from Mexico City as well as from Washington, the reality is that it is the most critical flash point in view of the year 2024, a moment at which the presidential elections of Mexico and the United States will coincide. It is there that the fears of the Americans will converge with the failures of Obradorism and the result is anything but certain.

Octavio Paz wrote that the border marks a greater cultural than geographical difference, an encounter of contrasting civilizations. Nothing illustrates this better than the way the Mexican government has responded to the growing U.S. clamor for Mexico to face its security, border control and migration problems. There is no doubt that the outcries of the U.S. legislators and governors entertain an evident political and electoral connotation trained on attracting their own voters, but that does not alter the fact that what impacts Mexicans are not the diatribes of prominent U.S. figures, but instead the extortion and violence that affect practically the whole population.   Wrapping oneself in the flag is very emotive, but that does not in any way change the reign of impunity and fear under which nearly all Mexicans live.

Similarly evident is the bias that the current Mexican government has imprinted on the strategy toward the U.S. Recognizing, however implicitly, that geography is unalterable, the government has maintained a somewhat schizophrenic policy  toward the Northern neighbor: fear concerning Trump, disdain for Biden; disinterest in the rules of the game inherent in the Mexico, United States and Canada Treaty (USMCA) vs. individual actions for specific companies to allay the risk that the U.S. might undertake punitive actions; control of Central-American migration, but paralysis on being confronted with the migratory crisis percolating along the entire border. Were it possible, the government would have distanced Mexico from the United States; since that is not an option, the government does whatever possible to provoke it. The risk lies in that, when the goings get complicated, it opts for setting off the equivalent of a nuclear bomb. This is not a small nor a minor risk.

The solution to the problems of Mexico does not reside in the presence of U.S. troops (or advisors) in its territory, but it is likewise obvious that many of the central problems characterizing Mexico cannot be attended to without the participation of the American government, nor can they be divorced from the reality of that country.  The easy way out would be to envelop oneself in the flag and hurl oneself (metaphorically) over the wall of Chapultepec Castle, but that would not change the circumstances of a region in which the one depends on the other.

The situation recalls Marx’s often quoted phrase in the sense that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce and we are now in the farce phase. Much the same disquisitions took place in the eighties and the final decision then was that it was impossible to resolve Mexico’s key problems without the concurrence of the U.S. government.

The notion that is possible to divorce the two countries is not only nostalgic, but also fallacious, merely ideological. Mexico’s real problem, exacerbated by the fact of the neighborhood, is found in the existence of a government that does not have the capacity (nor the disposition) to address such basic problems as security, justice and economic growth, all critical for getting ahead.

The visceral response is always to attack when confronted by the actions (almost consistently discursive) of the U.S. side, but that does not solve the problem facing Mexico, which is not drug addiction or fentanyl, but rather that the most rudimentary security has been denied to the population. I have not the least doubt that the arms turning up from the United States contribute, even decisively, to consolidating the power of the Narcos, but the Mexican problem is not that. As in so many other things that characterize the bilateral   relationship, whether that be directly or indirectly, the arms are pure and simply an incidental factor.

The President is beguiled by pipedreams of restoring the old political system and has dedicated his government, in its totality, to that purpose.  However, in terms of the matter of the bilateral relationship and security, the old system is unreproducible. In the middle of the past century the federal government was hyper-powerful, which conferred upon it the possibility of imposing conditions and limits on the Narcos of that epoch, all those Colombian. Today the Narcos are Mexican, they have entire regions under their control and the federal government is weak. Worse yet when that weakness is emphasized on limiting the capacity of action of the Army and the Navy. And much worse, because that is the underlying issue, when there is no investment in the building of a security system from the bottom up, the only one susceptible to modifying the reality of impunity and violence in the long term.

The neighborhood is an inalterable reality. The question is whether Mexico will see this as an opportunity or as a curse. As with Marx, Mexico has returned to the era where it is seen as a curse. The only one of the two that will function is opportunity.

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 Americas Quarterly
by Luis Rubio
March 22.2023

The president’s vision for the country is erasing years of institution-building efforts—and endangering its economic and political stability, says the chairman of Mexico Evalúa.

MEXICO CITY — Mexicans seem to enjoy economic and political crossroads; the country is often faced with one because it seldom addresses its underlying challenges. Now, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, has chosen to avoid economic crossroads altogether by simply killing the goose that lays the golden eggs—and even the USMCA is at risk.

For the last four decades, Mexico has lived through a contradiction that lies at the heart of its inability to cope with the ever more complex management of a modern economy. Other nations were willing to undertake broad reforms since the 1980s—including to their political systems—to stabilize and create conditions for long-term economic development. In contrast, Mexico undertook economic reforms largely in order to avoid reforming its politics. Therein lies the huge difference in results between Mexico and Chile, or between Mexico and its Asian peers.

Domestically, the persistent incoherence between the economic requirements of an ever more complex economy and the political capacity to deliver conditions for prosperity is what largely explains the vast differences between states. On one hand, Aguascalientes or Querétaro grow at Asian rates. On the other are the poverty-stricken southern states of Oaxaca, Chiapas and Guerrero, which continue to be dominated by local fiefdoms and special interests.

Moreover, these incompatibilities explain much of the other ills that affect Mexico: violence, organized crime, dysfunctional relationships between the federal government and state governors and, especially, the democratic deficit that continues to widen.

Through all these years, one administration after another subscribed to the paradigm that institutional build-up would strengthen the economy and lower the impact of the political incapacities that resulted from an old, stagnant and special interest-ridden political system. That explains the creation of regulatory agencies like the Competition Commission, the Telecommunications Commission, the Energy Regulatory Commission and so on. Same with the reform of the Supreme Court in 1994 and the creation of the independent electoral authority in 1996. Institutions were created to make up for the lack of a political system capable of addressing urgent needs like a functioning security system.

In retrospect, much of this has proven to be mere quick fixes that failed to address underlying issues, which, at their core, lead to the excessive powers of the Mexican presidency. Previous presidents opted not to challenge these institutions but, in retrospect, it’s clear that they had the power to change them, as AMLO has proven.

What matters is that, despite the failures in results, most Mexicans supported the process because they could see how the modern part of the economy—the one tied to NAFTA and, today, USMCA—worked. Unfortunately, the hope to join the winners became ever less likely to materialize as violence and the lack of a proper judicial and police system eroded not only hopes but also the daily livelihoods of most Mexicans, which led to the election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

AMLO follows a very different paradigm. For him what’s wrong is not the old political institutions that hamstring the economy, but the fact that the country is pursuing modernity when it should be sticking to its traditions. In a revealing visit to a small town in Mexico two years ago, he spent an inordinate amount of time visiting and praising an old, donkey-driven sugar mill. His message was clear: Mexico would prosper only to the extent that it went back in time. Therefore, his thrust has been to undermine the modern side of the economy while seeking to strengthen the presidency and the old national oil company. He’s aiming to solve the conundrum created by the disparity in economic and political reforms by backtracking on the economic reforms.

The last time Mexico took a similar route, back in the 1970s, the government went virtually bankrupt in 1982. The reforms that followed sought to break away from the vicious cycle of a government-led economy. But the lesson that AMLO derived from that era, when he was the PRI leader of his home state of Tabasco, was that fiscal excesses produced the collapse. Had those presidents been thriftier, goes his line of thinking, Mexico would have thrived.

None of what the president has done addresses the issues the average Mexican faces today, nor those that he himself identified, rightly, as the country’s core problems—like poverty, corruption and inequality. This augurs badly for the end of his term. Of course, if the election were held today, AMLO’s nominee would win outright. But 15 months from today, things may very well be radically different; the costs and liabilities he has piled up and the lack of results will likely take their toll. No less important is the fact that his party is now the incumbent and Mexicans have voted systematically against incumbents since 1997, the first election managed by the independent electoral authority IFE (now INE).

But now the INE itself risks being weakened and could be seriously undermined before the election. Meanwhile, the administration continues to challenge its partners in the USMCA, first with the energy reform and now effectively changing the rules on corn imports.

One can only wish that Mexico were facing a crossroads with at least one attractive alternative. But this will happen only if there is a truly competitive election in 2024, not the most likely scenario as institutions are being systematically curtailed. All of this bodes ill for both Mexicans and our neighbor to the north.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rubio is chairman of the think tank México Evalúa. He writes a weekly column in newspaper Reforma, and is the author and editor of dozens of books, including Unmasked: López Obrador and The End of Make-Believe, published by the Wilson Center.

https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/mexico-is-killing-its-golden-goose/

Luis Rubio

One of the great paradoxes that military dictatorships exhibit, reflects  Tom Stevenson,* lies in that they in the last analysis make their own troops less effective because of their imperious need for protecting themselves from a blow that would wind up in their removal. The paradoxes of power are always obtuse because their rationality proper is opposite to fortifying the conditions and circumstances that rendered them possible. Power is a Herculean-magnitude aphrodisiac but, when it fails to confront limits and counterweights, it is finally sustained on exceedingly flimsy moorings. The greater the concentration on power, the greater the contradictions and fragilities of the pillars bolstering it.

Unlimited power constitutes a threat for those not possessing it, the reason for which the evolution of societies, from traditional to modern, incorporates a parallel process of institutionalization. Those lacking the high dungeon of the powerful can be very distinct among themselves, but all share the same common denominator. When Robespierre denounces ever more persons, including many of his coreligionists, as traitors to the Revolution on the famous 8^th day of the Thermidor in 1794, it gives rise to the union of the entire convention, with his subsequent decapitation two days later. It took France three hundred years to build the institutions that govern it, one of whose central characteristics, similar to those of the whole modern and civilized world, is the institutionalization of power.

The creation of the National Revolutionary Party (PNR), grandfather of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), nearly a century ago responded precisely to that institutional rationale. The Revolution had concluded, but the country was without a functional governmental structure; additionally, many of the disputes of the day continued to be resolved in gruesome fashion, a period that concluded with the death of Obregón, President-Elect at the time for a new term of office. That provoked the decision of Plutarco Elías Calles to build mechanisms that would guide politics and bring the era of political violence to an end. The mechanism served for what it served during various decades, with the contribution of two great virtues and an enormous defect: the virtues comprised stability and economic growth; the defect  was its extraordinary inflexibility, which ushered in the crises of the seventies, eighties and nineties and to its   dramatic finale with the government of Peña Nieto.

The question today is, once again, how to institutionalize power but in a flexible manner that allows for the alternation of persons and political parties in government, all the latter ensconced in their capacity of abuse and imposition. Much of this was being constructed in this regard from the eighties, but everything has come to fall like a house of cards during these last few years, evidencing the immense fragility of the institutions that were developed with the purpose of channeling power and curbing its worst outrages.

Today we know that all that scaffolding was insubstantial and much of it unsustainable. Step by step, the President has been dismantling each of the scaffolds that purported to institutionalize the power. He has executed this by hook and by crook, never losing his sense of direction. From the beginning of his six-year term, the President changed the game rules, ignored the existing ones and imposed his own, these very simple: I am in command. Little by little he eliminated the relevance of nearly all of them.  He (almost) nullified the Supreme Court by means of appointments and menaces and the National Electoral Institute (INE) is presently up in the air, his claiming to de facto reincorporate its functions into the Ministry of the Interior (Secretaría de Gobernación). That is, as in other fields, he advances toward the recreation of that seventies fantasy world which, it shouldn’t be necessary to recall, ended up collapsing due to its unfeasibility.

Whoever watches the President’s daily early-morning media rants would immediately doubt the risks stifling the country today. In that novelesque and supernatural scenario the control of perceptions is unlikely, but absolutely real. The President fills the space for news and converts his obsessions into dogmas of faith. Like with a religious act, the message is profound and takes root in the consciences of millions of his fellow citizens who see themselves represented there. People believe in the President: that is his virtue, but also the breeding grounds of what easily could become in a not-so-distant future.

In contrast with other “hard” governments, which if they have anything in common it is a developmental spirit, the current government in Mexico procures solely two objectives: control and popularity. Both have made headway in this government, but neither counts on a fount of sustenance that could last. More to the point, the characteristic of those two elements, control and popularity, is their ephemeral and passing nature. Few Mexicans, encompassing the majority of those who approve of the President, want a regimen prone to abuse such as this one to be perpetuated. The error of many of those aspiring to govern is the contrary: they think that what is urgent is to return to what was resoundingly rejected by the electorate in 2018.

As Mexicans steadily approach 2024 the relevant question, the only transcendental one, is how to institutionalize the power in a way that those counterweights cannot be dismantled again, and, at the same time, avoid an inflexibility such that it paralyzes or makes the future impossible.

*LRB, v44 n19

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Luis Rubio

The verdict in the trial of García Luna directly affects the individual accused but, along the way, the questioning exposed the entire Mexican political system and exhibited a world of ambivalences concerning justice, drugs, corruption and the Mexico–United States relationship. It was not Mexico, but instead the political establishment that sat on the bench of the accused. And the result is not commendable for anyone.

What was extraordinary and exemplary about the trial, beyond the drama inside the courtroom, were the narratives, emotions, and opinions manifested throughout the process. To begin with, there appears to be nary a Mexican who does not think that García Luna is guilty. Some think that he is guilty of what he is accused of, the rest think that he is guilty of many other things, but all think that he deserves what is happening to him. The trial was about his participation in narcotrafficking, while the majority of Mexicans were picturing corruption in their minds. The ambivalence with respect to the essence of justice -that culpability must be demonstrated- is a subtlety that escapes Mexicans’ way of being. Decades of a corrupt judicial system that never achieves what the Constitution promises -prompt and expeditious justice- has made Mexico a country of cynics when it comes to criminality or corruption. The inexorable supposition is that everything is corrupt, which contradicts that often-hinted-at presumption (by AMLO in his daily rant) that “we are not equal.”

The trial essentially dealt with the importation of drugs from Mexico into the U.S. and the alleged assistance that the Ex-Minister of Public Security could have provided to the narcotraffickers. For the majority of Mexicans, those charges are perceived as irrelevant (or perhaps superfluous) because they are seen as different from those that are truly transcendent, that is, those that have something to do, in that line of thought, with his passing through the government and the corruption he might have entertained as much through government purchases as with links to organized crime. Of course, one does not exclude the other. However, for many Mexicans the issue of drugs continues to be seen as a U.S. problem that, by derivation, affects Mexico, as if the petty problems of insecurity, the mafias that create them and the incapacity of the Mexican government to deal with them did not exist.

The President became the privileged narrator of the trial because he supposed that this would emit a direct hit at his nemesis, Ex-President Felipe Calderón (which did occur), but the narrative ceased the day that the blows rained down on everyone, including the current government. Although nearly all the witnesses of the trial were convicted criminals seeking to reduce their sentences (which could well have biased their testimonies), what cannot be invented is the corruption that permeates the whole Mexican political system, from which no government can save itself.  Naive were those who thought that the only ones sullied would be the others.

García Luna was transformed into a symbol of the national state of affairs: whatever the sources of his fortune, all seemed to be related with his stint in Mexican politics. And that is the crucible through which he is viewed in Mexico: the trial served as confirmation of all the prejudices that characterize Mexicans with respect to their system of government.  Independently of political or party predilections, all politicians -and the system in general- emerge from the trial scratched and bruised. As proof, it is sufficient to remember that the drugs (and the corruption) continue to flow without limit despite that it has been ten years since García Luna left the government, proving that he was no more than one cog in a big machinery.

The trial evidenced the incapacity, or indisposition, of Mexican justice to sort out matters of corruption openly and transparently. One of the central elements of the trial, as seen from Mexico, was the fact that the process and all the testimonies were made public, in severe contrast with the opacity of the national judicial processes. The mere fact of exhibiting the corrupt practices became a milestone. In the face of that, it is inevitable the presumption that everything in Mexican justice is no more than an arranged (and politicized) fight.

But, above all, the trial exposed the ambivalences that distinguish the bilateral relationship, the positive as well as the negative.  In the same way that there are natural spaces of cooperation and mutual benefit, there are others in which resentments and grudges dominate on both sides of the border. Despite the enormous advances in building closeness between both nations, especially in economic and commercial matters, suspiciousness persists.

Because, at the end of the day, the AMLO administration has not faced the security problems or the ever-growing corruption, both at levels never before seen. And now the government will begin to see the wrath of American extremists that believe that they can fix it all from the outside. The liabilities never stop piling up.

Indeed, those who seem oblivious to all this coming and going are those who persist in engaging in corruption without realizing that in a few years they could be sitting on the same bench where the Ex-Minister recently sat in a New York court. 

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof

Luis Rubio

The great success of capitalism   has been the generation of wealth and prosperity for billions of global inhabitants and at the heart of that system of economic organization lies a crucial concept:  the separation of political power from wealth. Although capitalism and democracy, with all their tensions, advanced by means of distinct conduits over time, their convergence has been the highest transformer of the history of the world.

The tension between capitalism and democracy is natural and inevitable, but it diminishes or increases according to the circumstances. In concept, the distinction between them is logical: capitalism is a system of organization that makes possible the participation of economic agents in the process of the creation of the goods and services that the population demands. For its part, democracy, at least in its modern version, is exercised through popular representatives who are elected   and who procure the satisfaction of their voters and simultaneously advance the interests of their country.

Democracy and capitalism complement each other and function by way of a critical  linchpin: the Rule of Law, which institutes the rules of the game,  the limits to action, respectively, of the government and of the private citizens. In a perfect world, the tension between the two ambits -the political and the economic- generates opportunities for growth and development. In like fashion, during moments of difficulties or of divergence between both spaces, crisis situations are produced.

Those moments of crisis bring about excesses and abuses that are propitious circumstances for the establishment of tyrannical governments.

At his arrival to the presidency, López Obrador insisted on his conviction that economic decisions should subordinate themselves to the political power. The President was correct, except that his remark ignored that crucial linchpin: the nodal function of the law, and everything underlying it in terms of the protection of the rights of the citizens, for the country to be able to work.  In contrast with the central principle of prosperity, which separates power from wealth (while considering both equal), the presidential approach derives from the principle of subordination. Instead of clear, transparent and general rules, the government seeks special arrangements for each case, as happened with Tesla and Constellation Brands. No one should be surprised by the lethargy that the country is experiencing because of that way of governing.

The use of the verb subordinate is revealing because it implies submission, subjugation and humiliation. That is, the objective is not that of procuring the best balance between the economy and politics, but instead the control of one over the other. This is not a new problem in Mexico’s history: from the end of the revolutionary joust, the country has undergone permanent ups and downs, typically marked by moments of crisis that obligate the correction of the previously earmarked course. That pendular nature of functioning  of Mexican politics over time has cost enormous opportunities for development and  generated an interminable propensity toward thinking in the short term.

The politicians, impeded from attending to the citizens because that is not fruitful for them in any way, bend over backward to be at the service of the powerful one at the palace because therein lies the opportunity for their next job. Despite there evidently being great professional politicians in the country, none of them devote themselves to building a career founded on specialization, as occurs in the world’s successful democracies. That lack of specialization facilitates presidential control above all the political world, in that it makes impossible the consolidation of effective and permanent counterweights, a key factor for economic progress.

On their part, the entrepreneurs see themselves as obliged to think in terms of presidential cycles because they never know what occurrence will guide the next owner of the presidential ball. Historically, the economy followed a six-year cycle because everything depended on the mood of the governor-in-turn.

The North-American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) introduced a new dynamic into the Mexican economy in that it created sort or a watertight compartment that favored long-term investments on establishing clear and guaranteed game rules by an internationally recognized regime. Beyond the (huge) errors that hindered the conversion of the entire country into NAFTA territory, it is not by chance that the only part of the economy that continues to prosper is the one associated with that legal regime, today much more vulnerable than at the moment of NAFTA’s conception due to its renegotiation into the Mexico–United States–Canada Agreement (USMCA).

NAFTA’s chief political achievement was precisely that it made possible, for the first time since the Revolution, the separation between power and the generation of wealth. The greatest cost that AMLO (with the help of Trump) will have infringed upon the country consists of his having brought back to daily life, political control and the subordination of the productive sector. Rather than extending NAFTA’s “reign” to generalize the separation between the political power and the entrepreneurial world, he rolled the country back to its worst moments and vices.

At the dawning of the presidential succession, it is time to begin to reflect on the costs of a paleolithic administration in the era of informatics and what that implies for the magnitude of the correction that will have to take place if a generalized collapse is to be avoided.

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof

https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/aq-podcast-luis-rubio-on-why-mexicos-amlo-is-more-vulnerable-than-you-think/

Podcast

AQ Podcast: Luis Rubio on Why Mexico’s AMLO Is More Vulnerable Than You Think

MARCH 1, 2023

Despite AMLO’s popularity, judicial and political challenges may hamper his electoral plans for 2024, argues a leading analyst.

More than 100,000 Mexicans protested last weekend against President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s proposed changes to the country’s electoral institute. The marches highlight the leader’s relative vulnerability, despite his enduring approval ratings above 60%. Indeed, while the path may seem open for AMLO, as the president is known, to overhaul the country’s electoral institute and bring to power a candidate of his choosing in the 2024 elections, there are judicial and political obstacles to AMLO’s plans, argues this week’s guest. In this episode, Luis Rubio, chairman of the think tank México Evalúa, discusses AMLO’s current situation and the consequences for Mexico’s economy, 2024 presidential elections, and its relationship with the United States.

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Guests:

Luis Rubio is Chairman of think tank México Evalúa

Brian Winter is the editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly

Any opinions expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of Americas Quarterly or its publishers.